Digital Archives Lack Necessary Infrastructure Strategy

• Much of the web is highly ephemeral, with the average webpage lasting only about 100 days.
• A lack of national strategy leaves digital history vulnerable, as 38% of websites from 2013 no longer exist.
• Reliance on a single source like the Internet Archive poses technical, legal, and political risks.

The Fragility of Digital Memory

• Digital historian Jens Crueger emphasizes that web archiving is critical infrastructure for historians, journalists, lawyers, and AI developers.
• The Internet Archive, while successful, faces pressure from mass data requests by AI firms and contains inherent risks due to its U.S.-based hosting.
• Archiving involves subjective choices; for instance, storing historical misinformation presents challenges when it is later used to train AI models.

The State of Archiving in Germany

• The German National Library (DNB) has a legal mandate but operates with limited scope, having conducted only one systematic crawl of .de domains in over a decade.
• Accessibility is severely hindered by the "terminal barrier," which requires researchers to visit specific library locations in Frankfurt or Leipzig to view the archives.
• Crueger advocates for removing this legal barrier to increase transparency and provide political incentive for better funding.

A Strategy for the Future

• There is an urgent need for a well-defined collection mandate that moves beyond ad-hoc event harvesting.
• A collaborative strategy should involve archivists, journalists, historians, and citizens to determine what content truly reflects society, similar to participatory approaches taken in Ireland.
• Digital preservation should be decentralized, encouraging individuals and groups to archive their own web presence, particularly for marginalized communities whose history is often the first to disappear.